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Saturday, 16 May 2020 05:11

The prophecies of Q: American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase

This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America. If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to…

Saturday, 16 May 2020 05:10

Age and pandemic: Impact on plans and aspirations

Elizabeth Hubbart was booked for a cruise that followed the path of Lewis and Clark's expedition in the Pacific Northwest. Joel Demski was set to watch and cheer his grandson graduating from the Naval Academy. James Kelly planned a trip to Scotland, to scatter his father's ashes in the Clyde River near Glasgow. They are all older than 60. And like millions of others, they now face the painful realization that their plans, their hopes, their bucket-list items, were not simply deferred but in many cases denied, thanks to the Coronavirus. The global pandemic has left them wondering about the…

Saturday, 16 May 2020 05:08

To be more resilient in a crisis, focus on meaning, not happiness

A Nobel laureate, a Harvard professor, and an author all offer the same advice. There are a lot of sad, stressed people out their right now pacing their homes wondering how to be happier. But is happiness the right goal to chase? The first clue that the answer might be no comes from Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has argued that most people don’t really aim for happiness. That sounds shocking at first, but once you understand the distinction between happiness and satisfaction it makes perfect sense. Happiness is the positive feeling you get from a walk in nature…

Thursday, 14 May 2020 05:37

Five of the world’s other looming crises

Perhaps understandably, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many other international stories off the news agenda. It is global, it is deadly and it is multi-faceted, raising all sorts of questions, not just about how we respond to the initial crisis, but about the way we organise our societies and the way we run our affairs. Some major international problems have been pushed to the sidelines since the outbreak of the crisis and it may now be too late to deal with them. Others have been made much more intractable. And some governments are seeking to use the distraction of the…

Thursday, 14 May 2020 05:36

If you want to use vitamins to boost your immunity against Coronavirus, read this first

From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a focus on wellness, and ways to avoid becoming seriously ill. One of the methods people are relying on is taking vitamins targeted to bolstering immunity. In a rush to buy necessities, both orange juice and vitamin C supplements have seen sales spiking at the grocery store. Orange juice purchases jumped approximately 10% in March, and frozen orange juice sales increased by 27%, NPR reported. Large vitamin distributors have also reported a shortage of supplements targeted to boosting immunity. It’s estimated that sales of vitamin C skyrocketed 146% around the…

Wednesday, 13 May 2020 05:04

Let’s say there’s a Covid-19 vaccine - who gets it first?

An immunization shot is still in development, but debate over who gets priority has already begun. The race to find a vaccine against Covid-19 is well underway. It has to be—without one, the Before Time is never coming back. More than a hundred candidates are cooking, most still preliminary. A handful are in early human studies, three in Phase II clinical trials designed to see if they actually confer immunity to the disease. But nobody thinks finding a winner will be easy; vaccine development typically takes years. That’s time researchers and governments don’t feel like they have. Globally, more than…

Tuesday, 12 May 2020 05:36

How Coronavirus - a ‘rich man’s disease’ - infected the poor

When it arrived in the unforgiving industrial towns of central Mexico, the sand-swept sprawl of northern Nigeria and the mazes of metal shanties in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, Covid-19 went by another name. People called it a “rich man’s disease.” Pandemics throughout history have been associated with the underprivileged, but in many developing countries the Coronavirus was a high-class import — carried in by travelers returning from business trips in China, studies in Europe, ski vacations in the Rockies. As infections initially concentrated in better neighborhoods, many poor and working-class people believed the disease wouldn’t touch them, as if something…

Friday, 08 May 2020 05:30

Why we should all be wearing face masks

Face masks are a symbol of the pandemic era – a visual metaphor for the tiny, unseen viral foe that could be lurking around any corner. Some opt for a scarf wrapped around their face, others make do with a t-shirt yanked up over their mouth. The more creative hook colourful homemade varieties around their ears, while a lucky few wear distinctive surgical masks or, rarer still, N95 respirators. While a few months ago anyone wearing a mask in public would have drawn stares in many countries unused to this behaviour, they are now a reminder of the strange times…

Thursday, 07 May 2020 04:55

Coronavirus: What might the return to the office look like?

As lockdowns start to ease in many countries, so the tentative return to work begins, leaving people understandably concerned about how safe a space an office will be in the middle of a global pandemic. Alongside some mouldy old food in the communal fridges, there is likely to be an increase in the amount of technology used to monitor employees. From thermal cameras taking your temperature when you enter the building to apps or wearables to alert you if you get too close to colleagues, work could soon have the feel of the Minority Report movie. The Edge in Amsterdam…

Thursday, 07 May 2020 04:54

Will we ever shake hands again?

Around the world, humans are struggling to ignore thousands of years of bio-social convention and avoid touching another. Shaking hands might be one of the hardest customs to lose in the post-pandemic world but there are alternatives, writes James Jeffrey. The humble handshake spans the mundane to the potent, ranging from a simple greeting between strangers who will never meet again, to the sealing of billion-dollar deals between business titans. There are various ideas about the origin of the handshake. It may have originated in ancient Greece as a symbol of peace between two people by showing that neither person…

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Wednesday, 06 May 2020 05:17

Study shows 1918 pandemic linked to the rise of Nazis

In a warning for the potential political implications of Coronavirus, a New York Federal Reserve paper has shown a link between the 1918 flu pandemic and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. The study shows that cities with the greatest fatalities saw a reduction in social expenditure and that “influenza deaths of 1918 are correlated with an increase in the share of votes won by right-wing extremists.” “This holds even when we control for a city’s ethnic and religious makeup, regional unemployment, past right-wing voting, and other local characteristics assumed to drive the extremist vote share,” economist Kristian…

Wednesday, 06 May 2020 05:16

Virus-afflicted 2020 looks like a repeat of 1918 despite march of science

Despite a century's progress in science, 2020 is looking a lot like 1918. In the years between two lethal pandemics, one the misnamed Spanish flu, the other Covid-19, the world learned about viruses, cured various diseases, made effective vaccines, developed instant communications and created elaborate public-health networks. Yet here we are again, face-masked to the max. And still unable to crush an insidious yet avoidable infectious disease before hundreds of thousands die from it. As in 1918, people are again hearing hollow assurances at odds with the reality of hospitals and morgues filling up and bank accounts draining. The ancient…

Sunday, 03 May 2020 05:36

Heart attack: Three sleeping habits that put you at risk

Heart attacks are intimately connected to lifestyle factors so certain patterns of behaviour can determine your risk of having one. One study found that people who exhibited three insomnia-related symptoms were at a significantly higher risk of having a heart attack. Heart attacks often conjure up images of people falling to the floor and clutching their chest in agonising pain. While the event itself can be sudden and shocking, subtle signs can indicate your likelihood of having a heart attack long before you found yourself in the grip of one. This is because the condition is strongly tied to unhealthy…

Saturday, 02 May 2020 04:49

'I died and came back': 12-year-old recovers from virus

As her desperately sick daughter was being airlifted to a hospital, Jennifer Daly was thinking about all the parts of life that still lay ahead for her 12-year-old and whether she’d ever experience them: Would she get to fall in love? Would she get the chance to get married and have her own children? Driving across the causeway that separates the family’s home north of Lake Pontchartrain from the New Orleans hospital where their daughter was taken — with what was later determined to be a coronavirus infection — she was forced to imagine a life without her Juliet. “She’s…

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